How to Draw a Portrait Step by Step - Scaling Your Original Picture to the Right Size

So you've managed to go and get yourself a picture to draw from, that's simply the wrong size. Whether it's too big, or too small, here you'll learn how to scale that original picture to the correct size for your drawing.

As you may have found, it's remarkably difficult to do this freehand. You end up placing an eye slightly too large or in the wrong orientation, one side of the face ends up being thinner and more misshapen than the rest of it... generally terrible things that neither you or I want happening.

What you want to do then, is outline the whole thing first. Start with the darker main features. Outline them. Lightly! You want to be able to erase them if it turns out wrong, and if they're correct, you want to be able to draw over them later when you get around to really drawing the rest of the picture in.

And each time you finish the outline, compare it to the original picture. Compare it to everything else you've outlined. Are the proportions right? Will you have enough room around them to get in the entire picture you want to draw?

If they're not, no worries! Just lightly erase them and try again. Keep trying, over and over, until you get those proportions correct. Don't give up though! You're only just starting, and you don't want to rush one of the most important steps of the process.

If you've tried drawing to a different scale before, you probably already know from experience that getting these proportions wrong will mess up the entire picture by the time it's finished, even if you don't realize partway through.

And then all that effort, all that time, wasted... horrible feeling I know. Which is what we're trying to avoid! So, take your time over this. Hell, even take a ruler and measure out the original features, and then measure out yours and see if they scale up correctly! I know this is art, but that doesn't mean using a little bit of maths is wrong.

And once you've gotten this right, make plenty of light outlines of everything. You're confident that the entire picture will look right, so you can start with the darker areas first.

Remember, if you realize they aren't dark enough, you can make them darker later anyway, no problem. IF you start with the light areas, and make them too dark by accident because you don't have any dark areas already done to compare them to, then... you've got yourself a problem. Because the more you erase, and especially the more heavily you have to erase, the worse the final picture is going to turn out.

So remember. Outline everything first. Get your scale correct, and make sure you're confident you can draw in everything you wanted to draw.

Then start out with the dark areas, slowly adding in detail, shading, and depth to each of these features. and finally, do the lighter areas, using the dark areas you already drew, to compare them to, so you can make sure you have the contrast right.